An Uncharitable Admission WHY I DON’T GIVE MONEY TO WORTHY CAUSES
BY KEVIN MIMS
I
WRITING LIFE
like to think of myself as a friend of the poor. I live and work in a part of Sacramento that is populated by a lot of homeless street people. They are drawn there, I imagine, by the area’s many retail establishments, most of which have public restrooms and almost all of which offer a respite from the blazing heat of summer and the cold and wet of winter. At the bookstore where I work, I have numerous interactions with homeless people. If they look to be suffering from the heat, I will fetch them a cup of water and encourage them to relax on the sofa. I’ve never thrown anyone out for merely loitering in the store, not even the homeless guy who regularly sprawls on the sofa, falls asleep and snores noisily for hours on end. I have escorted a few crazy homeless people from the store, but only because they were yelling or creating some sort of frightening disturbance. Homeless panhandlers routinely come in and ask me to change their collection of coins into dollar bills. The manager of the store has upbraided me repeatedly for doing this (it makes it difficult to count out
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the money in the register at the end of the night if the cash drawer is piled high with coins), but I largely ignore him in order to help out my homeless pals. I frequently bring homemade cookies to the store and offer them to anyone who looks hungry. I’ve done this so often that there are members of the homeless community who, when they see me away from the bookshop, will recognize me and say, “Hey, it’s the cookie guy!” At election time, I cast my votes for the candidates who I think will do the most to help the poor and underprivileged. I have cared about disadvantaged Americans for as long as I can recall, so you may be surprised to hear that I have never made a charitable donation in my life. That’s right: I’ve never given so much as a nickel to The Salvation Army or a dime to March of Dimes. What’s more, I never give monetary handouts to panhandlers, not even those who regularly visit the bookstore where I work. I am a 57-year-old bleedingheart liberal and I’ve never given a penny to the poor. Where cold, hard cash is concerned, I’m about as charitable as Ebenezer Scrooge. A few times a year, I haul some junk out of my garage and cart it off to the nearest Goodwill collection center, but I do this mainly just to clean my garage; charity has nothing to do with it. Likewise, I buy Thin Mints from the Girl Scouts every year at fundraiser time, but charity doesn’t enter into this transaction either. I do it because I love Thin Mints. I have participated in numerous 5K and 10K charity runs, but I did it because I thought it would be an enjoyable way of getting exercise and communing
with other runners (and also because I wanted the cool T-shirt that my entry fee entitled me to). You probably think I am a terrible hypocrite: a man who professes to be greatly concerned about the poor but never willingly gives them a dime of his money. There may be some truth to this characterization but, believe it or not, I continue to think of myself as a generous person. At restaurants, I generally leave a 20 percent tip, even for mediocre service. What’s more, when I leave a restaurant with leftovers in a doggie bag, I immediately begin looking around for a homeless person to give them to. All my life, I have been the kind of person who can be counted on to help a friend move his belongings from one house to another. I am frequently called upon to housesit for my friends, or to pet-sit for them. If some friend asks me about an intriguing book on my shelf or a DVD in my collection, I will encourage them to take it. Once I’ve loaned something to someone, I almost never try to get it back. My motto is: Don’t loan it unless you are willing to never see it again. For these and other reasons, I tend to think of myself as a very generous guy. And yet there remains the fact that I am approaching my seventh decade without once having made a true charitable donation. I rationalize this odd parsimony of mine by bearing a few things in mind. First of all, though I am not poor and homeless myself, I am far from rich and always have been. My wife and I are lifelong members of the working class. Throughout our 35 years of marriage, we have tended to lurch from one fiscal crisis to the
next. Yes, we do occasionally buy items that might qualify as luxuries. Recently I purchased a used kayak for $200. I suppose I could have given that money to the poor and made do with my old kayak but, hey, I’m not an ascetic. I like streaming films on Netflix, I like dining out occasionally, I like buying books and, yes, I like to go kayaking. Sure, I could afford to send $25 most months to the World Wildlife Fund or some local shelter for battered women, but my contribution would do little more than salve my conscience. I couldn’t make a big enough donation to really make a difference in the world. What’s more, nearly every charitable organization in the world has a CEO making a lot more money than I do. And since my contribution would help to pay this CEO’s salary, it seems perverse for me to make one. A lot of charities devote an alarmingly large portion of their fundraising receipts to noncharitable activities. The Susan G. Komen foundation, for instance, spends close to $1 million a year suing smaller charities that dare to use the slogan “for the cure.” A 2011 investigative report by an Atlanta television station revealed that the American Cancer Society paid its CEO more than $2.2 million, despite the fact that the organization made across-the-board cuts to the programs it funded that year. The report also noted that ACS’s obligation to its employee pension fund was roughly $600 million, or more than four times the amount of money it spent on cancer research that year. I don’t mind if a charity wants to use its money to pay lavish